`Censored By Violence`

In Some Places, Letters To The Editor Are Lethal

WASHINGTON — From our fat-cat status in the world, the American news establishment sometimes forgets that its primary role is not to make money but to tell the truth.

Only when we see what is happening in places like China, South Africa, Chile or Colombia do we recall that the yearning to publish is a primal human need. It also can provoke more than an angry phone call.

``Whenever I see a motorcycle, I think that the time has finally come,``

a journalist in Bogota told Mark A. Uhlig of the New York Times recently. Colombian killers, whose targets include anyone who speaks out against their lucrative drug business, charge as little as $10 for silencing forever a member of the media. These ultimate censors usually ride motorcycles.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, whose honorary chairman is Walter Cronkite and whose working chairman is First Amendment lawyer James Goodale, issues a report every year on the number of journalists worldwide who have been ``censored by violence.``

In 1988, ``at least`` 24 journalists were killed, some covering wars but others simply writing about death squads or drugs or greed in their communities. ``More than`` 800 incidents-arrests, fines, assaults, expulsions- have occurred in more than 85 countries, the committee said. In the global war of words, some disgruntled readers respond with stronger weapons.

Some of these reporters have been foreign correspondents, journalists from other countries who get caught in the crossfire in Afghanistan or the Philippines, but most are people who were born in and who live in the community where they publish.

Unlike the foreign correspondents with their Banana Republic shirts and their electronic umbilical cords to offices in New York, Tokyo and London, these members of the press don`t have access to escape helicopters.

All of which brings us to the ``days of awe,`` as Dan Rather has called the events in China since the visit of Mikhail Gorbachev. It is possible that one of the reasons Chinese students in Beijing haven`t been trucked off to agricultural camps at this writing is that the cameras of CBS News and the BBC and CNN have been there. The world is watching electronically, and the videocameras, as long as they are running and transmitting their contents abroad, are providing some hope of protection against tanks.

But someday soon, barring the violence that feeds and excites our global news machine, viewers in the United States and elsewhere will begin to tire of the story from Beijing`s Tiananmen Square. Already Dan has come home. If the revolution reaches a long stalemate, television crews will begin packing. Media headquarters will begin to call home their ``extras.``

As the media crowd dwindles, the dangers increase for those who stay. For foreign reporters, the Chinese have not always been as hospitable as they have been in recent weeks. In 1988, for example, they used cattle prods against two British journalists who were confined to their hotel in Kashgar by the police. Their hotel-arrest apparently came about when they purchased airline tickets without official approval.

Moreover, China still echoes with the brief experiment with freedom in the 1950s when Chairman Mao said, ``Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.`` Soon after the dissenters blossomed, Mao declared them weeds and plucked them out of his intellectual garden.

Chinese journalists, some of whom have enjoyed more freedom in recent years, have protested in the streets this month. Some of those who speak English have been on American television: Two appearing on ``Nightline``

recently gave strong views about how the government should comport itself.

Sidney Jones, executive director of a group called Asia Watch that monitors civil and political liberties in the area, said last week after returning from the streets of Beijing that Chinese journalists are nervous.

``They think that they would be among the first people cracked down on once the hard-liners come in,`` Jones said.

But she also said that there are signs of hope from many of the young journalists whose hero is Liu Bin Yan, the reporter from the Chinese Daily who wrote a famous story about corruption in a regional government. The story was called ``People or Monsters?`` and it provoked support from readers, including some who sent their lifetime savings in the mail. Expelled from the Communist Party and denounced by the government, he has become a cult hero.

Last year the government allowed Liu Bin Yan and his wife to come to the United States, where he has been studying at Harvard. Liu, 62, has said he is uncertain whether he will return to China.

To watch these Chinese journalists at work is to remember what freedom of the press is all about.